The Modern Regime Volume I Part 26

CHAPTER III. AMBITION AND SELF-ESTEEM.

I. Rights and benefits.

The a.s.signment of right.--Those out of favor and the preferred under former governments.--Under the Ancient Regime.--During the Revolution.--French conception of Equality and Rights.--Its ingredients and its excesses.--The satisfaction it obtains under the new regime.--Abolition of legal incapacity and equality in the possession of rights.

--Confiscation of collective action and equality in the deprivation of rights.--Careers in the modern State.--Equal right of all to offices and to promotion.--Napoleon's distribution of employments.--His staff of officials recruited from all cla.s.ses and parties.

Now that the State has just made a new allotment of the burdens and duties which it imposes it must make a new a.s.signment of the rights and benefits it confers. Distributive justice, on both sides, and long before 1789, was defective, and, under the monarchy, exclusions had become as obnoxious as exemptions; all the more because, through a double iniquity, the ancient Regime in each group distinguished two other groups, one to which it granted every exemption, and the other which it made subject to every exclusion. The reason is that, from the first, the king, in the formation and government of the kingdom, in order to secure the services, money, collaboration or connivance which he needed, was obliged to negotiate always with corporations, orders, provinces, seignories, the clergy, churches, monasteries, universities, parliaments, professional bodies or industrial guilds and families, that is to say with const.i.tuted powers, more or less difficult to bring under subjection and which, to be kept in subjection, stipulated conditions.

Hence, in France, so many different conditions: each distinct body had yielded through one or several distinct capitulations and possessed its own separate statute. Hence, again, such diversely unequal conditions: the bodies, the best able to protect themselves, had, of course, defended themselves the best. Their statutes, written or unwritten, guaranteed to them precious privileges which the other bodies, much weaker, could neither acquire nor preserve. These were not merely immunities but likewise prerogatives, not alone alleviations of taxation and militia dispensations, but likewise political and administrative liberties, remnants of their primitive sovereignty, with many other positive advantages. The very least being precedence, preferences, social priority, with an incontestable right to rank, honors, offices, and favors. Such, notably, were the regions-states possessing their own government (pays d'etats), compared with those which elected the magistrates who apportioned taxation (pays d'election),[3301] the two highest orders, the clergy and the n.o.bles, compared with the third-estate, and the bourgeoisie, and the town corporations compared with the rest of the inhabitants. On the other hand, opposed to these historical favorites were the historical disinherited, the latter much more numerous and counting by millions--the taxable commons, all subjects without rank or quality, in short, the ordinary run of men, especially the common herd of the towns and particularly of the country, all the more ground down on account of their lower status, along with the Jews lower yet, a sort of foreign cla.s.s scarcely tolerated, with the Calvinists, not only deprived of the humblest rights but, again, persecuted by the State for the past one hundred years.

All these people, who have been transported far outside of civic relationships by historic right, are brought back, in 1789, by philosophic right. After the declarations of the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly, there are no longer in France either Bretons, Provencals, Burgundians or Alsatians, Catholics, Protestants or Israelites, n.o.bles or plebeians, bourgeois or rurals, but simply Frenchmen,

* all with the one t.i.tle of citizens,

* all endowed with the same civil, religious and political rights,

* all equal before the State,

* all introduced by law into every career, collectively, on an equal footing and without fear or favor from anybody;

* all free to follow this out to the end without distinction of rank, birth, faith or fortune;

* all, if they are good runners, to receive the highest prizes at the end of the race, any office or rank, especially the leading honors and positions which, thus far reserved to a cla.s.s or coterie, had not been allowed previously to the great mult.i.tude.

Henceforth, all Frenchmen, in theory, enjoy rights in common; unfortunately, this is only the theory. In reality, in all state relationships (dans la cite), the new-comers appropriate to themselves the offices, the pretensions, and more than the privileges of their predecessors; the latter, consisting of large and small land-owners, gentlemen, parliamentarians, officials, ecclesiastics, notables of every kind and degree, are immediately deprived of the rights of man.

Surrendered to rural jacqueries and to town mobs, they undergo, first, the neglect and, next, the hostility of the State: the public gendarme has ceased to protect them and refuses his services; afterwards, on becoming a Jacobin, he declares himself their enemy, treats them as enemies, plunders them, imprisons them, murders them, expels or transports them, inflicts on them civil death, and shoots them if they dare return; he deprives their friends or kindred who remain in France of their civil rights; he deprives the n.o.bles or the enn.o.bled of their quality as Frenchmen, and compels them to naturalize themselves afresh according to prescribed formalities; he renews against the Catholics the interdictions, persecutions and brutalities which the old government had practiced against the Calvinist minority.--Thus, in 1799 as in 1789, there are two cla.s.ses of Frenchmen, two different varieties of men, the first one superior, installed in the civic fold, and the second, inferior and excluded from it; only, in 1799, the greatest inequality consigned the inferior and excluded cla.s.s to a still lower, more remote, and much worse condition.

The principle (of equalite), nevertheless, subsists. Since 1789 it is inscribed at the top of every const.i.tution; it is still proclaimed in the new const.i.tution. It has remained popular, although perverted and disfigured by the Jacobins; their false and gross interpretation of it could not bring it into discredit; athwart the hideous grotesque caricature, all minds and sentiments ever recur to the ideal form of the cite to the veritable social contract, to the impartial, active, and permanent reign of distributive justice. Their entire education, all the literature, philosophy and culture of the eighteenth century, leads them onward to this conception of society and of rights; more profoundly still, they are predisposed to it by the inner structure of their intelligence, by the original cast of their sensibility7 by the hereditary defects and qualities of their nature and of their race.-The Frenchman easily and quickly grasps some general trait of objects and persons, some characteristic in common; here, this characteristic is the inherent quality of man which he dexterously makes prominent, clearly isolates, and then, stepping along briskly and confidently, rushes ahead on the high-road to consequences.[3302] He has forgotten that his summary notion merely corresponds to an extract, and a very brief one, of man in his completeness; his decisive, precipitate process hinders him from seeing the largest portion of the real individual; he has overlooked numerous traits, the most important and most efficacious, those which geography, history, habit, condition, manual labor, or a liberal education, stamp on intellect, soul and body and which, through their differences, const.i.tute different local or social groups. Not only does he overlook all these characteristics, but he sets them aside; they are too numerous and too complex; they would interfere with and disturb his thoughts; however fitted for clear and comprehensive logic he is so much the less fitted for complex and comprehensive ideas; consequently, he avoids them and, through an innate operation of which he is unconscious, he involuntarily condenses, simplifies and curtails henceforth, his idea, partial and superficial as it is, seems to him adequate and complete; in his eyes the abstract quality of man takes precedence of and absorbs all others; not only has this a value, but the sole value. One man, therefore, is as good as another and the law should treat all alike.--Here, amour-propre (self-esteem, pride or arrogance), so keen in France, and so readily excited, comes in to interpret and apply the formula:[3303]

"Since all men equal each other, I am as good as any man; if the law confers a right on people of this or that condition, fortune or birth, it must confer the same right on me. Every door that is open to them must be open to me; every door that is closed to me must be closed to them. Otherwise, I am treated as an inferior and wounded in my deepest feelings. When the legislator places a ballot in their hands he is bound to place another just like it in my hands, even if they know how to use it and I do not, even if a limited suffrage is of use to the community and universal suffrage is not. So much the worse if I am sovereign only in name, and through the imagination; I consent to my sovereignty being illusory, but with the understanding that the sovereignty of others is regarded likewise; so I prefer servitude and privation for all, rather than liberties and advantages for a few, and, provided the same level is pa.s.sed over all heads, I submit to the yoke for all heads, including my own."

Such is the internal composition of the instinct of' equality, and such is the natural instinct of Frenchmen. It is beneficial or mischievous according as one or the other of its ingredients predominates, at one time the n.o.ble sentiment of equity and at another time the low envy of foolish vanity;[3304] healthy or unhealthy, however, its power in France is enormous, and the new Regime gratifies it in every possible way, good or bad. No more legal disqualifications! On the one hand, the republican laws of proscription or of exception were all repealed: we have seen an amnesty and the return of the emigres, the Concordat, the restoration of Catholic worship, the compulsory reconciliation of the const.i.tutionalists with the orthodox; the First Consul admits no difference between them; his new clergy are recruited from both groups and, in this respect, he forces the Pope to yield.[3305] He gives twelve of the sixty episcopal thrones to former schismatics; he wants them to take their places boldly; he relieves them from ecclesiastical penitence and from any humiliating recantation; he takes care that, in the other forty-eight dioceses, the priests who formerly took the civic oath shall be employed and well treated by their superiors who, at the same epoch, refused to take the civic oath. On the other hand, all the exclusions, inequalities and distinctions of the monarchy remain abolished. Not only are the Calvinist and even Israelite cults legally authorized, the same as the Catholic cult, but, again, the Protestant consistories and Jewish synagogues[3306] are const.i.tuted and organized on the same footing as the Catholic churches. Pastors and rabbis likewise become functionaries under the same t.i.tle as bishops and cure's; all are recognized or sanctioned by the government and all equally benefit by its patronage: it is an unique thing in Europe to find the small churches of the minority obtaining the same measure of indifference and good will from the State as the great church of the majority, and, henceforth, in fact as in law, the ministers of the three cults, formerly ignored, tolerated or proscribed, enjoy their rank, t.i.tles and honors in the social as well as in the legal hierarchy, equally with the ministers of that cult which was once the only one dominant or allowed

Similarly, in the civilian status, no inferiority or discredit must legally attach to any condition whatever, either to plebeian, villager, peasant or poor man as such, as formerly under the monarchy; nor to n.o.ble, bourgeois, citizen, notable or rich man, as recently under the Republic. Each of these two cla.s.ses is relieved of its degradation; no cla.s.s is burdened by taxation or by the conscription beyond its due; all persons and all property find in the government, in the administration, in the tribunals, in the gendarme, the same reliable protection.--So much for equity and the true spirit of equality.--Let us now turn around and consider envy and the bad spirit of equality. The plebiscite, undoubtedly, as well as the election of deputies to the Corps Legislatif are simply comedies; but, in these comedies, one role is as good as another and the duke of the old or new pattern, a mere figurant among hundreds and thousands of others, votes only once like the corner-grocer. Undoubtedly, the private individual of the commune or department, in inst.i.tutions of charity, worship or education, is deprived of any independence, of any initiation, of any control, as the State has confiscated for itself all collective action; but the cla.s.ses deprived of this are especially the upper cla.s.ses, alone sufficiently enlightened and wealthy to take the lead, form projects and provide for expenditure: in this usurpation, the State has encroached upon and eaten deeper into the large body of superior existences scattered about than into the limited circle where humbler lives clamber and crawl along; nearly the entire loss, all perceptible privation, is for the large landed proprietor and not for his hired hands, for the large manufacturer or city merchant and not for their workmen or clerks,[3307]

while the clerk, the workman, the journeyman, the handicraftsman, who grumble at being the groundlings, find themselves less badly off since their masters or patrons, fallen from a higher point, are where they are and they can elbow them.

Now that men are born on the ground, all on the same level, and are confined within universal and uniform limits, social life no longer appears to them other than a compet.i.tion, a rivalry inst.i.tuted and proclaimed by the State, and of which it is the umpire; for, through its interference, all are comprised within its enclosure and shut up and kept there; no other field is open to run on; on the contrary, every career within these bounds, indicated and staked out beforehand, offers an opportunity for all runners: the government has laid out and leveled the ground, established compartments, divided off and prepared rectilinear lists which converge to the goal; there, it presides, the unique arbiter of the race, exposing to all compet.i.tors the innumerable prizes which it proposes for them.--These prizes consist of offices, the various employments of the State, political, military, ecclesiastical, judiciary, administrative and university, all the honors and dignities which it dispenses, all the grades of its hierarchy from the lowest to the highest, from that of corporal, college-regent, alderman, office--supernumerary, a.s.sistant priest up to that of senator, marshal of France, grand master of the university, cardinal, and minister of State. It confers on its possessor, according to the greater or lesser importance of the place, a greater or lesser portion of the advantages which all men crave and seek for money, power, patronage, influence, consideration, importance and social pre-eminence; thus, according to the rank one attains in the hierarchy, one is something, or of some account; outside of the hierarchy, one is nothing.

Consequently, the faculty for getting in and advancing one's self in these lists is the most precious of all: in the new Regime it is guaranteed by the law as a common right and is open to all Frenchmen. As no other outlet for them is allowed by the State it owes them this one; since it invites them and reduces everybody to competing under its direction it is bound to be an impartial arbiter; since the quality of citizen, in itself and through it alone, confers the right to make one's way, all citizens indifferently must enjoy the right of succeeding in any employment, the very highest, and without any distinction as to birth, fortune, cult or party. There must be no more preliminary exclusions; no more gratuitous preferences, undeserved favors, antic.i.p.ated promotions; no more special favors.--Such is the rule of the modern State: const.i.tuted as it is, that is to say, monopolizer and omnipresent, it cannot violate this rule for any length of time with impunity. In France, at least, the good and bad spirits of equality agree in exacting adherence to it: on this point, the French are unanimous; no article of their social code is more cherished by them; this one flatters their amour-propre and tickles their imagination; it exalts hope, nourishes illusion, intensifies the energy and enjoyment of life.--Thus far, the principle has remained inert, powerless, held in suspension in the air, in the great void of speculative declarations and of const.i.tutional promises. Napoleon brings it down to the ground and renders it practical; that which the a.s.semblies had decreed in vain for ten years he brings about for the first time and in his own interest. To exclude a cla.s.s or category of men from offices and promotion would be equivalent to depriving one's self gratuitously of all the talents it contains, and, moreover, to incurring, besides the inevitable rancor of these frustrated talents, the sullen and lasting discontent of the entire cla.s.s or category. The First Consul would do himself a wrong were he to curb his right to choose: he needs every available capacity, and he takes them where he finds them, to the right, to the left, above or below, in order to keep his regiments full and enroll in his service every legitimate ambition and every justifiable pretension.

Under the monarchy, an obscure birth debarred even the best endowed men from the princ.i.p.al offices. Under the Consulate and the Empire the two leading personages of the State are Lebrun, Maupeou's old secretary, a productive translator,[3308] a lawyer, formerly councilor in a provincial court of justice, then third-consul, then Duc de Plaisance and arch-chancellor of the Empire and Cambaceres, second-consul, then Duc de Parme and arch-chancellor of the Empire, both of them being princes. Similarly, the marshals are new men and soldiers of fortune, a few of them born in the cla.s.s of inferior n.o.bles or in the ordinary bourgeois cla.s.s, mostly among the people or even amongst the populace, and, in its lowest ranks, Ma.s.sena, the son of a wine-dealer, once a cabin-boy and then common soldier and non-commissioned officer for fourteen years; Ney, son of a cooper, Lefebvre, son of a miller, Murat, son of a tavern-keeper, Lannes, son of an hostler, and Augereau, son of a mason and a female dealer in fruit and vegetables.--Under the Republic, n.o.ble birth consigned, or confined, the ablest and best qualified men for their posts to a voluntary obscurity, only too glad when their names did not condemn them to exile, imprisonment or to the guillotine. Under the Empire, M. de Talleyrand is prince of Benevento, minister of foreign affairs and vice-grand-elector with a salary of five hundred thousand francs. We see personages of old n.o.bility figuring in the first ranks: among the clergy M. de Roquelaure, M. de Boisgelin, M. de Broglie, M. Ferdinand de Rohan; in the magistracy, M. Seguier, M.

Pasquier, M. Mole; on the domestic and decorative staff of the palace, Comte de Segur, grand-master of ceremonies, Comte de Montesquiou-Fezensac, grand-chamberlain, also as chamberlains, Comtes d'Aubusson de la Feuillade, de BriG.o.de, de Croy, de Coutades, de Louvois, de Brancas, de Gontaut, de Grammont, de Beauvau, de Lur-Saluces, d'Haussonville, de Noailles, de Chabot, de Turenne,[3309]

and other bearers of historic names.--During the Revolution, at each new parliamentarian, popular or military coup d'etat the notabilities of the vanquished party were always excluded from office and generally outlawed. After the coup d'etat of Brumaire, not only are the vanquished of the old parties all brought back under the protection of the law, but, again, their notables are promoted to the highest offices. Among the monarchists of the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly Mabuet is made councilor of State, and Maury archbishop of Paris; forty-seven other ecclesiastics who, like himself, refused to take the oath to the civil const.i.tution of the clergy, are appointed, like him, to episcopal thrones. Among the Feuillants of the Legislative a.s.sembly, Vaublanc is made prefect, Beugnot a councilor of State and minister of the finances in the grand-duchy of Berg, Matthieu Dumas a brigadier-general and director of reviews, Narbonne becomes the aid-de-camp and the intimate interlocutor of Napoleon, and then amba.s.sador to Vienna; if Lafayette had been willing, not to ask for but to accept the post, he would have been made a marshal of France.--Among the few Girondists or Federalists who did not perish after the 2nd June, Riouffe is prefect and baron, Lanjuinais is senator and count; among others proscribed, or half proscribed, the new Regime restores to and places at the head of affairs the superior and special employees whom the Reign of Terror had driven away, or singled out for slaughter, particularly the heads of the financial and diplomatic services who, denounced by Robespierre on the 8th Thermidor, or arrested on the morning of the 9th already felt their necks under the blade of the guillotine; Reinhart and Otto are amba.s.sadors, Mollien is count and treasury minister, Miot becomes councilor of state, Comte de Melito minister of finances at Naples, while Gaudin is made minister of finances in France and Duc de Gaete. Among the transported or fugitives of Fructidor, Barthelemy becomes senator, Barbe-Marbois director of the Treasury and first president of the Cour des Comptes; Simeon, councilor of State and then minister of justice in Westphalia; Portalis is made minister of worship, and Fontanes grand-master of the University. The First Consul pa.s.ses the sponge over all political antecedents: not only does he summon to his side the moderates and half-moderates of the Const.i.tuent and Legislative a.s.semblies, of the Convention and of the Directory, but again he seeks recruits among pure royalists and pure Jacobins, among the men the most devoted to the ancient Regime and amongst those most compromised by the Revolution, at both extremities of the most extreme opinions. We have just seen, on the one side, what hereditary favorites of a venerable royalty, what born supporters of the deposed dynasty, are elevated by him to the first of his magisterial, clerical and court dignities. On the other hand, apart from Cha.s.set, Roederer and Gregoire, apart from Fourcroy, Berlier and Real, apart from Treilhard and Boulay de La Meurthe, he employs others branded or noted for terrible acts, Barere himself, at least for a certain period, and in the sole office he was fitted for, that of a denunciator, gazetteer and stimulator of public opinion; everybody has a place according to his faculties, and each has rank according to his usefulness and merit.

Barere, consequently, becomes a paid spy and pamphleteer; Drouet, the postmaster, who arrested the royal family at Varennes, becomes sub-prefect at Sainte-Menehould; Jean-Bon Saint-Andre, one of the Committee of Public Safety, is made prefect at Mayence; Merlin de Douai, reporter of the law against suspects, is prosecuting attorney in the court of ca.s.sation; Fouche, whose name tells all, becomes minister of state and Duke of Otranto; nearly all of the survivors of the Convention are made judges of premiere instance or of appeal, revenue-collectors, deputies, prefects, foreign consuls, police commissioners, inspectors of reviews, head-clerks in the post-offices, custom-houses and tax-offices, while, in 1808, among these functionaries, one hundred and thirty were regicides.[3310]

II. Ambitions during the Ancient Regime.

The need of success.--Initiation and conditions of promotion under the old monarchy.--Effect on minds.--Ambitions are limited.--The external outlets open to them.

To make one's way, get ahead, and succeed in the world is now the dominant thought in the minds of men. Before 1789, this thought had not acquired sovereign control in their minds; it found that there were rival ideas to contend with, and it had only half-developed itself; its roots had not sunk down deep enough to monopolize the activity of the imagination, to absorb the will and possess the mind entirely; and the reason is that it lacked both air and victuals. Promotion, under the old monarchy, was slow, and in the first place, because the monarchy was old and because in every order which is not new each new generation finds that every office is filled, and next, because, in this old order founded on tradition and heredity, future vacancies were supplied long beforehand. The great social staircase led to several stories; each man could ascend every step of his own flight, but he could not mount above it; the landing reached, he found closed doors and nearly insurmountable barriers. The story above was reserved to its own inhabitants; they occupied it now and were still to occupy it in time to come; the inevitable successors of the t.i.tular possessor were seen around him on each step, his equals, peers and neighbors, one or the other often designated by name as his legal heir, the purchaser of his survivorship.

In those days, not only was the individual himself considered, his merits and his services, but likewise his family and ancestry, his state and condition, the society he entered into, the "salon" he maintained, his fortune and his followers; these antecedents and surroundings composed the quality of the personage; without this requisite quality, he could not go beyond the landing-place. Strictly speaking, a personage born on the upper steps of one story might sometimes succeed in mounting the lowest steps of the next story, but there he stopped. In short, it was always considered by those on the lower story that the upper story was inaccessible and, moreover, uninhabitable.

Accordingly, most of the public offices, in the finances, in the administration, in the judiciary, in the parliaments, in the army, at court, were private property as is now the case with the places of advocates, notaries and brokers; they had to be bought to enable one to follow these pursuits, and were very dear; one had to possess a large capital and be content beforehand to derive only a mediocre revenue from it, 10, 5 and sometimes 3 % on the purchase-money.[3311] The place once acquired, especially if an important one, involved official parade, receptions, an open table, a large annual outlay;[3312] it often ran the purchaser in debt; he knew that his acquisition would bring him more consideration than crowns. On the other hand, to obtain possession of it, he had to secure the good-will of the body of which he became a member, or of the patron who bestowed the office. That is to say, he must be regarded by his future colleagues as acceptable, or by the patron as a guest, invited, and feasible friend, in other words, provide sponsors for himself, furnish guarantees, prove that he was well-off and well-educated, that his ways and manners qualified him for the post, and that, in the society he was about to enter, he would not turn out unsuitable. To maintain one's self in office at court one was obliged to possess the tone of Versailles, quite different from that of Paris and the provinces.[3313] To maintain one's self in a high parliamentary position, one was expected to possess local alliances, moral authority, the traditions and deportment handed down from father to son in the old magistrate families, and which a mere advocate, an ordinary pleader, could not arrive at.[3314] In short, on this staircase, each distinct story imposed on its inmates a sort of distinct costume, more or less costly, embroidered and gilded, I mean a sum of outward and inward habits and connections, all obligatory and indispensable, comprising t.i.tle, particle and name: the announcement of any bourgeois name by a lackey in the ante-chamber would be considered a discord; consequently, one had one's self enn.o.bled in the current coin, or a.s.sumed a n.o.ble name gratis. Caron, son of a watchmaker, became Beaumarchais; Nicolas, a foundling, called himself M. de Champfort; Danton, in public doc.u.ments, signed himself d'Anton; in the same way, a man without a dress-coat hires or borrows one, no matter how, on going out to dine; all this was tolerated and accepted as a sign of good behavior and of final conformity with custom, as in testimony of respect for the usages of good society.

Through this visible separation of stories, people had acquired the habit of remaining in the condition in which they were placed; they were not irritated by being obliged to stay in it; the soldier who enlisted did not aspire to become an officer; the young officer of the lower n.o.blesse and of small means did not aspire to the post of colonel or lieutenant-general; a limited perspective kept hopes and the imagination from fruitlessly launching forth into a boundless future: ambition, humbled to the ground at the start, walked instead of flying; it recognized at the outset that the summits were beyond its reach; to be able to mount upward one or two steps was enough.--In general, a man obtained promotion on the spot, in his town, corporation or parliament.

The a.s.sistant-counselor who pleaded his first case in the court of Gren.o.ble or of Rennes calculated that, in twenty years, he would become first judge at Gren.o.ble or at Rennes, rest twenty years or more in office, and he aimed at nothing better. Alongside of the counselor of a (court) presidency, or of an "election" magistrate, of a clerk in the salt-tax bureau, or in the frontier custom-house, or in the bureau of "rivers and forests," alongside of a clerk in the treasury or ministry of foreign affairs, or of a lawyer or prosecuting attorney, there was always some son, son-in-law or nephew, fitted by domestic training, by a technical apprenticeship, by moral adaptation, not only to perform the duties of the office, but to be contented in it, pretend to nothing beyond it, not to look above himself with regret or envy, satisfied with the society around him, and feel, moreover, that elsewhere he would be out of his element and uncomfortable.

Life, thus restricted and circ.u.mscribed, was more cheerful then than at the present day; souls, less disturbed and less strained, less exhausted and less burdened with cares, were healthier. The Frenchman, exempt from modern preoccupations, followed amiable and social instincts, inclined to take things easily, and of a playful disposition owing to his natural talent for amusing himself by amusing others, in mutual enjoyment of each other's company and without calculation, through easy and considerate intercourse, smiling or laughing, in short, in a constant flow of inspiration, good-humor and gayety.[3315] It is probable that, if the Revolution had not intervened, the great parvenus of the time and of the Empire would, like their forerunners, have submitted to prevailing necessities and readily accommodated themselves to the discipline of the established Regime. Cambaceres, who had succeeded to his father as counselor at the bar of Montpellier, would have become president (of the tribunal) in his turn; meanwhile, he would have composed able jurisprudential treatises and invented some new pate de becfigues; Lebrun, former collaborator with Maupeou, might have become counselor in the court of excise at Paris, or chief-clerk in the Treasury department; he would have kept up a philosophical salon, with fashionable ladies and polished men of letters to praise his elegant and faulty translations. Amongst the future marshals, some of them, pure plebeians, Ma.s.sena, Augereau, Lannes, Ney, Lefebvre, might have succeeded through brilliant actions and have become "officers of fortune," while others, taking in hand specially difficult services, like commandant Fischer who undertook the destruction of Mandrin's band, and again, like the hero Chevert, and the veteran Luckner, might have become lieutenant-generals. Rough as these men were, they would have found, even in the lower ranks, if not full employment for their superior faculties, at least sufficient food for their strong and coa.r.s.e appet.i.tes; they would have uttered just the same oaths, at just as extravagant suppers, with mistresses of just the same caliber.[3316]

Had their temperament, character and genius been indomitable, had they reared and pranced to escape bridle and harness and been driven like ordinary men, they need not have broken out of the traces for all that; there were plenty of openings and issues for them on either side of the highway on which others were trotting along. Many families often contained, among numerous children, some hot-headed, imaginative youth, some independent nature rebellious in advance, in short, a refractory spirit, unwilling or incapable of being disciplined; a regular life, mediocrity, even the certainty of getting ahead, were distasteful to him; he would abandon the hereditary homestead or purchased office to the docile elder brother, son-in-law or nephew, by which the domain or the post remained in the family; as for himself, tempted by illimitable prospects, he would leave France and go abroad; Voltaire says[3317] that "Frenchmen were found everywhere," in Canada, in Louisiana, as surgeons, fencing-masters, riding-masters, officers, engineers, adventurers especially, and even filibusters, trappers and backwoodsmen, the supplest, most sympathetic and boldest of colonizers and civilizers, alone capable of bringing the natives under a.s.similation by a.s.similating with them, by adopting their customs and by marrying their women, mixing bloods, and forming new and intermediary races, like Dumas de La Pailleterie, whose descendants have furnished original and superior men for the past three generations, and like the Canada half-breeds by which the aboriginal race succeeds in transforming itself and in surviving.

They were the first explorers of the great lakes, the first to trace the Mississippi to its mouth, and found colonial empires with Champlain and Lasalle in North America and with Dupleix and La Bourdonnais in Hindustan. Such was the outlet for daring, uncontrollable spirits, restive temperaments under constraint and subject to the routine of an old civilization, souls astray and uncla.s.sed from their birth, in which the primitive instincts of the nomad and barbarian sprouted afresh, in which insubordination was innate, and in which energy and capacity to take the initiative remained intact.--Mirabeau, having compromised his family by scandals, was on the point of being dispatched by his father to the Dutch Indies, where deaths were common; it might happen that he would be hanged or become governor of some large district in Java or Sumatra, the venerated and adored sovereign of five hundred thousand Malays, both ends being within the compa.s.s of his merits. Had Danton been well advised, instead of borrowing the money with which to buy an advocate's place in the Council at about seventy thousand livres, which brought him only three cases in four years and obliged him to hang on to the skirts of his father-in-law, he would have gone to Pondicherry or to the palace of some indigenous rajah or king as agent, councilor or companion of his pleasures; he might have become prime-minister to Tippoo Sahib, or other potentate, lived in a palace, kept a harem and had lacs of rupees; undoubtedly, he would have filled his prisons and occasionally emptied them by a ma.s.sacre, as at Paris in September, but it would have been according to local custom, and operating only on the lives of Sheikhs and Mahrattas. Bonaparte, after the fall of his protectors, the two Robespierres, finding his career arrested, wanted to enter the Sultan's service; accompanied by Junot, Muiron, Marmont and other comrades, he could have carried to Constantinople rarer commodities, much better compensated in the Orient than in the Occident, namely military honor and administrative talent; he would have dealt in these two products, as he did in Egypt, at the right time and in the right place, at the highest price, without our conscientious scruples and without our European refinements of probity and humanity. No imagination can picture what he would have become there: certainly some pasha, like Djezzar in Syria, or a khedive like Mahomet-Ali, afterwards at Cairo; he already saw himself in the light of a conqueror, like Ghengis-Khan,[3318] a founder like Alexander or Baber, a prophet like Mahomet; as he himself declares, "one could work only on a grand scale in the Orient," and there he would have worked on a grand scale; Europe, perhaps, would have gained by it, and especially France.

III. Ambition and Selection.

The Revolution provides an internal outlet and an unlimited career.--Effect of this.--Exigencies and pretensions of the modern man.--Theoretical rule of selection among rivals.

--Popular suffrage raised to be lord and judge.--Consequence of its verdict.--Unworthiness of its choice.

But the Revolution arrived and the ambitions which, under the ancient Regime, found a field abroad or cooled down at home, arose on the natal soil and suddenly expanded beyond all calculation. After 1789, France resembles a hive in a state of excitement; in a few hours, in the brief interval of an August morning, each insect puts forth two huge wings, soars aloft and "all whirl together pell-mell;" many fall to the ground half cut to pieces and begin to crawl upward as before; others, with more strength or with better luck, ascend and glitter on the highways of the atmosphere.--Every great highway and every other road is open to everybody through the decrees of the Const.i.tuent-a.s.sembly, not only for the future, but even immediately. The sudden dismissal of the entire ruling staff, executive, or consultative, political, administrative, provincial, munic.i.p.al, ecclesiastical, educational, military, judicial and financial, summon to take office all who covet it and who have a good opinion of themselves. All previously existing conditions, birth, fortune, education, old family and all apprenticeships, customs and ways which r.e.t.a.r.d and limit advancement, are abolished: There are no longer any guarantees or sponsors; all Frenchmen are eligible to all employments; all grades of the legal and social hierarchy are conferred by a more or less direct election, a suffrage becoming more and more popular, by a mere numerical majority. Consequently, in all branches of the government under central or local authority and patronage, there is the installation of a new staff of officials. The transposition which everywhere subst.i.tutes the old inferior to the old superior, is universal,[3319] "lawyers for judges, bourgeois for statesmen, former plebeians for former n.o.bles, soldiers for officers, officers for generals, cures for bishops, vicars for cures, monks for vicars, stock-jobbers for financiers, self-taught persons for administrators, journalists for publicists, rhetoricians for legislators, and the poor for the rich." A sudden jump from the bottom to the top of the social ladder by a few, from the lowest to the highest rung, from the rank of sergeant to that of major-general, from the condition of a pettifogger or starving newspaper-hack to the possession of supreme authority, even to the effective exercise of omnipotence and dictatorship--such is the capital, positive, striking work of the Revolution.

At the same time, and as an after-effect, a revolution is going on in minds and the moral effect of the show is greater and more lasting than the events themselves. The minds have been stirred to their very depths; stagnant pa.s.sions and slumbering pretensions are aroused. The mult.i.tude of offices presented and expected vacancies "has excited the thirst for power, stimulated self-esteem, and fired the hopes of men the most inept. An fierce, gross presumption has freed the ignorant and the foolish of any feeling of modesty or incompetence; they have deemed themselves capable of everything because the law awards public office simply to the able. Everybody had a perspective glimpse of gratified ambition; the soldier dreamt only of displacing the officer, the officer of becoming general, the clerk of supplanting the head administrator, the lawyer of yesterday of the supreme court, the cure of becoming bishop, the most frivolous litterateur of seating himself on the legislative bench. Places and positions, vacant due to the promotion of so many parvenus, provided in their turn a vast career to the lower cla.s.ses. Seeing a public functionary issue out of nothingness, where is the s...o...b..ack whose soul would not stir with ambition?"--This new sentiment must be taken into account: for, whether reasonable or not, it is going to last, maintain its energy, stimulate men with extraordinary force[3320] and become one of the great incentives of will and action.

Henceforth, government and administration are to become difficult matters; the forms and plans of the old social architecture are no longer applicable; like construction is not possible with materials of a different kind, whether with stable or unstable materials, with men who do not dream of quitting their condition or with men who think of nothing but that.

In effect, whatever vacancy may occur, each aspirant thinks himself fit for it, and only one of the aspirants can obtain it. Accordingly some rule of preference must be adopted outside of the opinion that each candidate entertains of himself. Accordingly, at a very early date, one was established, and there could be no better one, namely, that, among the compet.i.tors for the place, the most competent to fill it should be chosen. Unfortunately, the judge, ordinary, extraordinary and supreme, inst.i.tuted to decide in this case, was the plurality of male, adult Frenchmen, counted by heads, that is to say a collective being in which the small intelligent, elite body is drowned in the great rude ma.s.s; of all juries, the most incompetent, the easiest duped and misled, the least able to comprehend the questions laid before it and the consequences of its answer; the worst informed, the most inattentive, the most blinded by preconceived sympathies or antipathies, the most willingly absent, a mere flock of enlisted sheep always robbed or cheated out of their vote, and whose verdict, forced or simulated, depended on politicians beforehand, above and below, through the clubs as well as through the revolutionary government, the latter, consequently, maneuvering in such a way as to impose itself along with their favorites on the choice of the French people. Between 1792 and 1799, the republican official staff just described is thus obtained.--It is only in the army where the daily and keen sense of a common physical and mortal danger ends in dictating the choice of the best, and raises tried merit to the highest rank; and yet it must be noted that Jacobin infatuation bore down as rigorously on the army as elsewhere and on two occasions: at the outset through the election of a superior officer conferred on subordinates, which handed rank over to the noisy disputants and intemperate intriguers of the mess-room; and again during the Reign of Terror, and even later,[3321] in the persecution or dismissal of so many patriotic and deserving officers, which led Gouvion-Saint-Cyr and his comrades, through disgust, to avoid or decline accepting high rank, in the scandalous promotion of club brawlers and docile nullities, in the military dictatorship of the civil proconsuls, in the supremacy conferred on Lech.e.l.le and Rossignol, in the subordination forced on Kleber and Marceau, in the absurd plans of a demagogue with huge epaulettes like Cartaux,[3322] in the grotesque orders of the day issued by a swaggering inebriate like Henriot,[3323]

in the disgrace of Bonaparte, and in the detention of Hoche.--In the civil order of things, it was worse. Not only was the rule of regulating promotion by merit not recognized but it was applied in an inverse sense. In the central government as in the local government, and from top to bottom of the hierarchy, from the post of minister of foreign affairs down to that of president of a petty revolutionary committee, all offices were for the unworthy. Their unfitness kept on increasing inasmuch as incessant weeding out worked against them, the functionary, degraded by his work, growing worse along with his function.--Thus the const.i.tutional rights of merit and capacity ended in the practical privilege of incapacity and demerit. And in the allotment of grades and social advantages, distributive justice had given way to distributive injustice, while practice, contrary to theory, inst.i.tuted permanently, on the one hand, the exclusion or retirement of competent, instructed, expert, well-bred, honorable and respected men and, on the other hand, brought forward illiterate, inept and rude novices, coa.r.s.e and vulgar brutes, common blackguards, men used up or of tarnished reputations, rogues ready for anything, fugitives from justice, in short the adventurers and outcasts of every kind and degree.[3324] The latter, owing their success to perversion or lack of conscientiousness, derived their princ.i.p.al t.i.tle from their vigorous fists and a fixed determination to hold on to their places as they had obtained them, that is to say by main force and by the murder or exile of their rivals.--Evidently, the staff of officials which the Declaration of Human Rights had promised was not the staff on duty ten years later there was a lack of experience.[3325] In 1789, careers were open to every ambition; down to 1799, the rivalry of ambitions had simply produced a wild uproar and a brutal conquest. The great modern difficulty remained: how to discipline the compet.i.tion and to find an impartial judge, an undisputed arbitrator of the compet.i.tion.

IV. Napoleon, Judge-Arbitrator-Ruler.

Napoleon as judge of compet.i.tion.--Security of his seat.

--Independence of his decisions.--Suppression of former influences and end of monarchical or democratic intrigues.

--Other influences against which he is on guard.--His favorite rule.--Estimate of candidates according to the kind and amount of their useful labor.--His own competency.--His perspicacity.--His vigilance.--Zeal and labor of his functionaries.--Result of compet.i.tion thus viewed and of functions thus exercised.--Talents utilized and jealousies disarmed.

Behold him, at last, this judge-arbitrator. On the 8th November, 1799, he appears and takes his seat, and that very evening he goes to work, makes his selections among the compet.i.tors and gives them their commissions. He is a military chieftain and has installed himself; consequently he is not dependent on a parliamentary majority, and any insurrection or gathering of a mob is at once rendered abortive by his troops before it is born. Street sovereignty is at an end; Parisians are long to remember the 13th of Vendemaire and the way General Bonaparte shot them down on the steps of Saint-Roch. All his precautions against them are taken the first day and against all agitators whatever, against all opponents disposed to dispute his jurisdiction. His arm-chair as first Consul and afterwards his throne as Emperor are firmly fixed; n.o.body but himself can undermine them; he is seated definitively and will stay there. Profound silence reigns in the public crowd around him; some among them dare whisper, but his police has its eye on them.

Instead of conforming to opinion he rules it, masters it and, if need be, he manufactures it. Alone by himself from his seat on high, in perfect independence and security, he announces the verdicts of distributive justice. Nevertheless he is on his guard against the temptations and influences which have warped the decisions of his predecessors; in his tribunal, the schemes and intrigues which formerly obtained credit with the people, or with the king, are no longer in vogue; from now on, the profession of courtier or of demagogue is a poor one.--On the one hand, there is no success, as formerly under the monarchy, through the attentions of the ante-chamber, through elegant manners, delicate flattery, fashionable drawing-rooms, or valets and women on an intimate footing; mistresses here enjoy no credit and there are neither favorites nor the favored; a valet is regarded as a useful implement; great personages are not considered as extra-ornamental and human furniture for the palace. Not one among them dare ask for a place for a protege which he is incapable of filling, an advancement which would derange the lists of promotions, a pa.s.s over the heads of others; if they obtain any favors, these are insignificant or political; the master grants them as an after-thought, to rally somebody, or a party, to his side; they personally, their ornamental culture, their high-bred tone, their wit, their conversational powers, their smiles and bows--all this is lost on him, or charged to account. He has no liking for their insinuating and discreet ways;[3326] he regards them as merely good domestics for parade; all he esteems in them is their ceremonial significance, that innate suppleness which permits them to be at once servile and dignified, the hereditary tact which teaches them how to present a letter, not from hand to hand, but on the rim of a hat, or on a silver plate, and these faculties he estimates at their true worth.--On the other hand, n.o.body succeeds, as lately under the Republic, through tribunal or club verbosity, through appeals to principles, through eloquent or declamatory tirades; "glittering generalities," hollow abstractions and phrases made to produce an impression have no effect; and what is better, political ideology, with a solicitor or pleader, is a bad note. The positive, practical mind of the judge has taken in at a glance and penetrated to the bottom of arguments, means and valid pretensions; he submits impatiently to metaphysics and pettifoggery, to the argumentative force and mendacity of words.--This goes so far that he distrusts oratorical or literary talent; in any event when he entrusts active positions or a part in public business then he takes no note of it. According to him, "the men who write well and are eloquent have no solidity of judgment; they are illogical and very poor in discussion,"[3327] they are mere artists like others, so many word-musicians, a kind of special, narrow-minded instrument, some of them good solo players, like Fontanes, and who the head of a State can use, but only in official music for grand cantatas and the decoration of his reign. Wit in itself, not alone the wit which gives birth to brilliant expressions and which was considered a prime accomplishment under the old regime, but general intelligence, has for him only a semi-value.[3328] "I am more brilliant[3329], you may say?

Eh, what do I care for your intelligence? What I care for is the essence of the matter. There is n.o.body so foolish that is not good for something--there is no intelligence equal to everything." In fact, on bestowing an office it is the function which delegates; the proper execution of the function is the prime motive in determining his choice; the candidate appointed is always the one who will best do the work a.s.signed him. No fact.i.tious, party popularity or unpopularity, no superficial admiration or disparagement of a clique, of a salon, or of a bureau, makes him swerve from his standard of preference.[3330]

He values men according to the quality and quant.i.ty of their work, according to their net returns, and he estimates them directly, personally, with superior perspicacity and universal competency. He is special in all branches of civil or military activity, and even in technical detail; his memory for facts, actions, antecedence and circ.u.mstances, is prodigious; his discernment, his critical a.n.a.lysis, his calculating insight into the resources and shortcomings of a mind or of a soul, his faculty for gauging men, is extraordinary; through constant verifications and rectifications his internal repertory, his biographical and moral dictionary, is kept daily posted; his attention never flags; he works eighteen hours a day; his personal intervention and his hand are visible even in the appointment of subordinates. "Every man called to take part in affairs was selected by him;"[3331] it is through him that they retain their place; he controls their promotion and by sponsors whom he knows. "A minister could not have dismissed a functionary without consulting the emperor, while the ministers could all change without bringing about two secondary changes throughout the empire. A minister did not appoint even a second-cla.s.s clerk without presenting a list of several candidates to the emperor and, opposite to it, the name of the person recommending him." All, even at a distance, felt that the master's eyes were on them. "I worked," says Beugnot,[3332] "from night to morning, with singular ardor; I astonished the natives of the country who did not know that the emperor exercised over his servitors, however far from him they might be, the miracle of the real presence. I thought I saw him standing over me as I worked shut up in my cabinet."--"Under him," writes Roederer, "there is no man of any merit who, as a reward for long and difficult labor, does not feel himself better compensated by a new task than by the most honorable leisure." Never did positions less resemble sinecures. Never was the happiness of successful candidates or the misery of unsuccessful candidates better justified. Never the compliance, the difficulty, the risks of a required task have been compensated more fairly by the enjoyment of the allocated rewards nor moderated the bitterness of the frustrated pretensions.[3333] Never were public functions a.s.signed or fulfilled in a way to better satisfy the legitimate craving for advancement, the dominant desire of democracy and of the century, and in a way to better disarm the bad pa.s.sions of democracy and of the century, consisting of an envious leveling, anti-social rancor and the inconsolable regrets of the man who has failed. Never did human compet.i.tion encounter a similar judge, so constant, so expert and so justified.--He is himself conscious of the unique part he plays. His own ambition, the highest and most insatiate of all, enables him to comprehend the ambition of others; to place everywhere the man who suits the post in the post which suits the man--this is what he has done for himself and what he does for others. He knows that in this lies his power, his deep-seated popularity, his social utility.